Hi Folks,
I often wondered why mathematics books seem so focused on prime numbers.
Now I know.
Recall what a prime number is: an integer larger than 1 is said to be prime if it cannot be written as a product of two smaller positive integers.
Here are some prime numbers: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13.
A number that is not prime is said to be composite. Here are some composite numbers: 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12.
So every positive integer is either a prime or a composite.
It can be proven that every composite number can be decomposed into a product of primes.
Further, there is only one way to factorize a composite number into primes. This is called the unique factorization theorem.
So, the building blocks of every integer beyond 1 are primes. In this sense the primes from mathematics correspond to the atoms from chemistry and deserve the same kind of intense scrutiny.
Neat!
So I created two XML documents, collectively containing the first million prime numbers.
The first XML document contains the first 500,000 primes and the second XML document contains the 500,001 to 1,000,000 prime numbers:
http://www.xfront.com/first-500000-primes.xmlhttp://www.xfront.com/second-500000-primes.xml
Be patient. They are large files (10 MB and 11 MB, respectively)
/Roger